After 2.5 years of mostly meaningless nonsense, I’ve decided to put an end to this site.  We’ve had some good posts, we’ve had a lot of mediocre posts, and we’ve rarely had any focus.

This site has served as a mental dump for me to post commentary, funny videos and pictures, reviews of products and video games, and anything else that crossed my mind as something I should share with the public.  These things have all been fun, have given me a good amount of feedback, and were often enjoyable to put together.  However, they were also often the things that kept the site from being anything cohesive, and kept it from being a place where anyone felt the need to revisit on a regular basis.  Myself included.  I’ve always known I wanted to create things, provide content, and do things that would entertain others.  The problem was that I never knew how to connect my ideas or develop an audience.  I still don’t feel like I do, but I think I’m further along than when I started Goatmoose, and I believe a new start is required for anything good to happen.

As such, I’m working on a fresh platform and have started a new blog for my future endeavors.  For all 4.1 of you that are subscribed to this feed, please stick with me on my new site at jeffsaporito.wordpress.com.  Tell a friend.  It’s going to be swell, and I’d like to have you along.

Thank you to anyone who has visited Goatmoose over the years.  It’s time to move on.  Let’s do something real.

Jeff

From the site:

It takes about 3-5 business days for your t-shirt to ship and up to 7 days after that for delivery.
LOLShirts ships via the U.S. Postal Service by Priority or First Class Mail.
If you have not received your t-shirt in 2 weeks from the date of your order, please contact us and we can track it down for you.
Tracking will be emailed to you when the product actually ships.

I’ve sent two emails to customer service within the last week, both to no response. They say to contact them if you haven’t received your item in two weeks. I’m past that – I’m still waiting on hearing that the thing has actually shipped.

All this is curious given my previously great response to buying from Tanga. Did anyone else place an order through LOLShirts? Have you had success?

Update: (9/5/11)
The shirt finally arrived on August 29th, nearly a month after ordering it. I still to this day haven’t received any response from LOLShirts’ customer service in regards to my emails. At least I got the product. The shirt looks decent as far as quality goes, but I’m not sure I’d order from this site again unless they had another dirt cheap sale and I really didn’t care how long it took to arrive.

I’ve always been told I was part of Generation Y, or the Millennial Generation.  Apparently now my generation is being re-dubbed Generation R – The Recession generation.

En route to work this morning, I heard a short interview with NPR’s Jeremy Hobson and St. Joseph’s University Sociology Professor Maria Kefalas.  She has been researching those born between 1980-1990, the generation that has recently found itself entering the workforce.  Her statements are about a generation of people trying to enter the workforce during a recession and the struggles they face financially- both due to the difficulty of finding good work and the challenge of paying for a college education.  Being born in 1985, I find myself smack in the middle of this group and completely understand where she’s coming from.

The American idea has always been that if you go to college, you can get a better job, and everything will be swell.  Most past generations have shown children ending up one socioeconomic tier above their parents.  But with this recession, people are finding all this to be less and less true, and don’t have as positive an outlook for the future.

During the interview, Kefalas said “Working class kids said to us, “Listen, we’re going to be the first generation of Americans to do worse than our parents.” One young woman said, “I just feel burned. My friends who didn’t go to college, they don’t have debt and they’re making more an hour than I am.””

In my experience, this is true. I could think of dozens of former college classmates who don’t have jobs any better than ones they could have landed without college.  In fact, aside from a few pharmaceutical, engineering or medical exceptions, I can think of very few who have a relevant job at all.  The majority are struggling.  And nearly everyone I know who didn’t go to college, or instead went to a far less expensive tech or trade school, makes considerably more than those of us who did.  They started into the workforce earlier, put in time, and by the time we finished college with all out debt and zero experience, they had 4-5 years of real world experience beneath them and were moving on to promotions.

Between my wife and myself, we graduated college with around $100,000 of debt – 80% of it being hers.  Are we making up that difference now through our jobs?  Did our degrees help us get better jobs?  No.  We both work full-time just to practically break even every month.  I don’t expect to ever earn the difference I paid for college to have justified the cost.  I feel I basically paid $100k for a wife, having met her during her freshman year.  Worth every penny, sure, but not the point.

All this makes the value of things like graduate school really come into question.  Sure, Bachelor’s degrees are becoming so common they are almost worthless – but would doubling my debt to get an advanced degree have ended up paying off?  It’s a risk I personally never wanted to take.  I work with several older people who have Master’s that make the same as me, and say they haven’t made this much money in years.  Perhaps my generation will be able to refocus people on the value of individual skill sets and unique human intelligences instead of putting so much emphasis on the pieces of paper people carry.

Hobson went on to ask Kefalas “Generation R knows what it’s like to be in terrible economic times, but they probably also remember the great times of the ’90s or at least the early and mid-2000s, economically. What do they think of the difference?”

Her reply: “I think they look at the pop culture icons like Paris Hilton and they’re sort of cringing in embarrassment… conspicuous consumption they say has gone out of fashion. And they don’t want to be seen as throwing money around when their families are eating into their resources to keep them afloat.”

Another true fact.  My parents have tapped out a lot of their savings for my education and to sustain me through multiple layoffs and job changes since finishing college.  They even used their line of credit to purchase my car and house while I worked towards taking over the payments, and I’m finally coming up on being able to do that.  I graduated in December 2007 and am on my 7th job since then – the first one with real promise to last a while.  My parents have been forced to help a lot in those few years.

The point of Kefalas’ examining our age group specifically is that it’s not just about a recession for us.  It’s our lives.  The economy and poor job market has impacted millions of people and is not unique to any demographic, but we are the first group tackling this sort of situation without any foundation, straight out of school.  We are coming out of a social climate where costly education and massive debt straight are a requirement and are thrown into a poor market that isn’t doing anything to help.

What all this will lead to, I don’t know.  Economists project that by the time my own kids go to college, it’ll cost as much as $300,000 for an average-tier education.  The median household income in the United States better be able to take a real steep hike by then.  Based on current numbers, that’s every dollar made by the average American family for over half a decade.  That’s just not reasonable.  Especially when it impacts us right now – my generation isn’t currently blessed with the opportunity to start saving for our kids.

The Generation R Project has its own website.  It greets visitors with a statement – “As one young woman told a reporter recently, “our parents raised us to believe we could do anything, and now we’re finding out that’s not true.””

Though I can’t speak for an entire generation, I will say for myself, my wife, and the future, that we’ll do the best we can.

Your thoughts are, as always, welcome.

Fortunately, I don’t feel like a loser.

The point of NaNoWriMo isn’t to create the perfect novel in 30 days.  As the pep-talks from published authors and contest organizers constantly remind us, it’s not even about writing a good book in 30 days.  In fact, writing a good book in 30 days is nearly impossible.  The purpose of the contest is to get words on “paper,” out of our minds and into a place where they can be worked with and altered.  It’s about the community that helps motivate people to write, and to keep writing.  It’s about getting people started doing something that is so easy to procrastinate with and put off.  Trust me, I’ve been putting off seriously working on a novel since I was ten.

The fact that I got as far into my story in 15 days as I did was a great accomplishment for me.  It changed tone and altered its plot several times from when I started, and I still have no idea where it’ll end up.  NaNoWriMo got me started, and being as far into the story as I am, I have a great deal of motivation to finish.  People know I started the book.  I told them.  They were interested.  To stop now would be failure.  Not finishing by November 30th has nothing to do with it.

So, while I would have loved to have hit that golden 50,000 word mark within the next four hours – it simply won’t happen this year.  Perhaps next year things will be different.  Either way, I’ve got a solid start, and I thank the competition for the boost.  Now I can set a personal goal of finishing by Christmas.

NaNoWriMo is “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon! “  Are you up for it?

Now if I only knew what to write about…

Goatmoose recently underwent a move.  Though it moved from goatmoose.com to goatmoose.com, its hosting platform has changed and a giant shift occurred.  As you may discover when scrolling through the site, images have disappeared from a number of previous posts.  Though my intentions were to back up all image data before completing the move in case this very problem existed, I can’t find them.  Therefore, the posts with dead images will have to remain as such until I uncover where on the digital earth I saved them – if I indeed remembered to save them at all.

In the meantime, it’s nice to have the site somewhere else.  I’ve been reading back through previous entries and must say, there’s some good stuff here.  And it should not be ignored any longer.  Let’s hope I can live up to that statement.

But after about ten weeks of solid single-handed raditude, he turned this Hooverville into a brand-new, clean-aired biscuit tin of happiness. Having completely gutted every room, re-painted, re-floored, re-everythinged, it’s looking pretty swell.

The album below shows 1-4 shots of how each room used to look, followed by 1-4 shots of how they now look. Check out the album and thumb through the pictures at your own pace.

Avatar QuizCall Review: http://www.xbox360digest.com/2010/05/06/review-avatar-quizcall/

Top 10 Free Blackberry Apps for the End of May, 2010: http://igadgetlife.com/reviews/top-10-free-blackberry-apps-for-the-end-of-may-2010/

Review of CiragoTV Platinum CMC2000 1.5TB Network Multimedia Player: http://igadgetlife.com/reviews/review-of-ciragotv-platinum-cmc2000-1.5tb-network-multimedia-player/

Review of Brenthaven Zero Impact Stylus III-XF 17” Laptop Case

Review of 23″ HP De-Branded HDMI 1080p LCD Monitor w/Speakers

Review: Avatar QuizCall

Also, Hamster Olympics (see below) is going to be on G4′s Web Soup – I’ll relay the specific date when I find out. In the meantime, join the fan page on Facebook.